Rebellious ramblers carrying a model boat are taking to the paths of Devon to cheerfully commit a crime: trespassing on private land. Why, asks Lucy Kenningham
On Saturday a group of mildly rebellious ramblers carrying a model boat will take to the paths of Devon to cheerfully commit a crime: by trespassing on private land.
The group Right to Roam have organised the protest, routed up Vixen Tor in Devon, which they claim will be the largest mass trespass in a generation (yes there have been precedents). The walk will be peaceful, leave no trace, bears no ill will to the landowner and pick up litter as it goes. Attending will be walkers, runners, paddle borders and more. Not attending or supporting, for understandable reasons, will be landowners and anglers.
For England’s green and pleasant land, ramblers claim, is far too often behind fences: 92 per cent of it is inaccessible to the public, along with 97 per cent of water ways, much to hikers’ and kayakists’ chagrin.
What’s more, 2,700 hectares of the eight per cent of land that is “open access” is inaccessible due to being surrounded by private land. These so-called “access islands”, or open access land that is surrounded by private land with no public right of way, are what Saturday’s march will target; Vixen Tor being one of these. Protestors will rally by a significant wall, which separates the open access land from the private land. Musicians and artists will bring a large boat to symbolise the crossing of the “access island”.
Raring to roam: but will it make a difference?
Just last year, Right to Roam managed to overturn the removal of wild camping rights in Dartmoor after a successful protest. Another precedent is the Kinder Scout Trespass of 1932 when 400 walkers sparked a movement leading to the establishment of National Parks, National Trails and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000.
Roamers are wrangling for open-access laws like the ones in Scotland, granted in 2003 partly due to ramblers’ protests, which grant access and wild camping to nearly everywhere. Similar laws abound in Scandinavia though Scandi flora and fauna is better looked after than Scots’, where some have complained that since 2003, the police have taken a step back from fining litterers. The result, apparently, is trash.
Until the 1600s, most of England was free to roam. But the slow hedgerowing of Britain developed hand in hand with late feudalism and capitalism. By the 1800s, half of the country was fenced off.
Ironically, this change occurred just as people got interested in “taking a walk” – formerly a foreign concept.
Walking was once the domain of vagrants. After all, if you toil in a field all day, you’re unlikely to clock off with the urge to go for a five-mile pleasure hike. But as feudalism declined, capitalism prospered and when cities really started to take off urban dwellers found they craved green space, exercise and a break from the smog.
The poets and painters of the 18th century spurred on the walking movement, mythologising it. Romanticists revelled in landscape and nature, elevating their power. Wordsworth described the Lake District as “a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy” – and even composed nine out of 10 of his verses whilst pacing outdoors. Wordsworth would walk for four hours a day and for him rambling was indivisible from poetry.